As America hardens into empire, and the assumptions and conceits of imperialism become the social and political norm, the American “left” is morphing into a mutant caricature of itself: we see this in the recent decision by the San Francisco “Gay Pride” parade committee to revoke an earlier decision to honor whistle-blower Bradley Manning.

Manning, for those late to the party, is the 25-year-old Army private who – somehow – had access to a huge cache of USmilitary and diplomatic “secrets” and revealed them to the world via Wikileaks. First and most dramatically, he released a US government video depicting the slaughter of innocent Iraqis by a team of wise-cracking Americans piloting a helicopter gunship. It shocked the world – and rocked the US military establishment when Wikileaks posted it online. The warlords of Washington have been out to get Manning – and Wikileaks – ever since.

What does San Francisco’s “gay pride” celebration – a week-long street party, part drag-queens-in-boa-feathers and Dykes on Bikes, part political rally by the “San Francisco Democrats,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick contemptuously referred to them – have to do with Manning? It seems the Parade Committee’s “electoral college” – a gathering of all the past “Grand Marshals” – voted for Manning (a gay man) to be honored as the 2013 Parade Grand Marshal, a decision quickly overruled by the Grand Poobahs of the “executive board,” led by one Lisa L. Williams, a local political hack and sometime political appointee to minor city posts. In a statement that had all the hallmarks of a announcement by the old Soviet Politiboro of the latest political purge, Williams declared:

“Bradley Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year’s San Francisco Pride celebration. His nomination was a mistake and should never have been allowed to happen. A staff person at SF Pride, acting under his own initiative, prematurely contacted Bradley Manning based on internal conversations within the SF Pride organization. That was an error and that person has been disciplined. He does not now, nor did he at that time, speak for SF Pride.”

“Disciplined”? Sounds very S&M. Did Williams administer the punishment herself? Aside from that, however, there is something very weird about this “should never have been allowed to happen” business. Williams is here speaking the language of outright authoritarianism: deviations from the Party Line, it seems, are not only doubleplusungood – but even the possibility of Thoughtcrime must be eliminated. That kind of language is rarely used by ordinary Americans, even in the realm of politics: only in Marxist-Leninist (and certain fundamentalist religious) sects do we hear this sort of dogmatic assertiveness. One wonders: what country is this person living in?

The answer is that San Francisco, in many ways, isn’t part of America: like Washington, D.C., and certain other urban blights, it is another country altogether, one where everyone (who’s anyone) is a “progressive,” and the city is effectively a one-party state that resembles Cuba more than it does the real America. The only difference is that in Cuba, at least, they still remember their old commie roots: in the San Francisco of the new millennium, however, the old anti-imperialism of the progressive community has been replaced by identity politics. With President Barack Obama in the White House, and America conducting even more wars of aggression than under his Republican predecessor, the “progressives” have jumped on the bandwagon of America’s post-9/11 imperial expansion. It’s their empire now, and they mean to defend it. Williams – a former regional coordinator for the Obama campaign, and a local Democratic party hack – is quite clear about this:

“Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this country. We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform – and countless others, military and civilian alike – will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It is, and would be, an insult to every one, gay and straight, who has ever served in the military of this country.”

The idea that Manning put anyone – in uniform or out – in danger is refuted by the Pentagon itself, which admitted Manning’s actions physically harmed no one. Other than that, however, Williams’s statement is a perfect reiteration of the Obama administration’s case against Manning – and against the movement that has arisen on the right as well as the left against our interventionist foreign policy. According to Williams, anyone who challenges a foreign policy that gave those helicopter gunships the capacity to cut down Iraqi civilians in their own city is “placing in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform.” Anyone who defies the cult of secrecy surrounding US war crimes around the world is a “traitor,” as a leader of one gay veterans’ group characterized Manning. Critics of our foreign wars are invariably accused of this, although in the past the charge has mostly emanated from the right side of the political spectrum. What makes this incident significant is that it is now coming from what used to be the left.

Lisa Williams is a small-time political servitor, which means she is a big wheel in the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. As proprietor of a political consulting firm, One Source Consulting, she was firmly ensconced in the local party machine before moving up the ladder to coordinate Obama’s’s pro forma campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s no ideologue: she’s a careerist, pure and simple. Her motive is pragmatic rather than ideological: she is terrified that her organization – the Gay Pride committee – already discredited by its gross financial mismanagement of the millions that flow into its coffers will suffer further embarrassment as the purveyor of an inconvenient radicalism offensive to the higher-ups she is lobbying for a promotion.

The putrid icing on this foul-tasting cake is her replacement for Manning as parade Grand Marshal: California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a rising star in the Democratic party firmament, former San Francisco City Attorney – not to mention a former One Source Consulting client. So there’s a pecuniary interest here, too – and isn’t that just so typical of the crony-capitalist regime we suffer under today? It’s all about politicians enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense – or, in this case, at the expense of a gay guy who’s been tortured, according to the UN, and held in prison without trial for three years, because he exposed the lies, the shitty little betrayals, and the murderous arrogance of our rulers as they rampage across the globe.

The de-Marshaling of Bradley Manning might seem like a trivial matter to some, but it is in reality a real cultural turning point. It used to be that what passes for the “left” in American politics was identified with a principled opposition to the American conceit that we are the inheritors of the British empire, and that now that the British lion has turned into a bit of a pussycat it’s up to the American eagle to police the world. Opposition to this arrogant nonsense was once central to any American liberal or leftist’s self-conception (with the exception of those “cold war liberals” who today would be called neoconservatives). Today, in Obama’s America, they have embraced the cause of yesteryear’s Anglophiles and taken up what we used to call the White Man’s Burden – except today it is the Multi-Cultural Multi-Gendered LGBT Man’s Person’s Burden.

In the place of the old imperialism we see new threads emerging as the dominant colors in this ideological tapestry, first and foremost State-worship. The older sort of left-liberal never identified with the State, because, after all, it wasn’t their State – it was the hated capitalist state. The old-fashioned Marxists, of course, were hardcore when it came to this question: they made a principle of never cooperating with the cops. Anyone who did was ostracized and denounced as a stool pigeon.

However, that has all changed. Now that they are the cops – and by they I don’t mean the few remaining old-fashioned Marxists – this reflexive resistance to authority on the left has undergone a Bizarro World transformation into its exact opposite: a veritable worship of governmental authority. How else to explain that little advertising clip on MSNBC featuring Rachel Maddow admonishing us for not utilizing the government as a builder of bridges and other cool stuff. “They say the future doesn’t belong to us,” she declaims, sneering at those craven slovenly conservatives who shrink from National Greatness, “it belongs to China!” The subtext here is we need to be more like China – an authoritarian state that sacrifices its teeming hordes of slaves on the altar of the Five Year Plan, while China’s crony capitalists – the “communist” princelings – buy up Manhattan real estate (and fund our debt). Government is good: more government is even better.

The old “New Left” of the 1960s was infatuated with Maoism: “revolutionary” China loomed large in the leftist imagination as a utopian laboratory where their egalitarian nostrums were being administered in large doses. The Great Cultural Revolution enthralled them, and the various far-left groups competed, for a while, for the China franchise. Beijing eventually conferred its semi-official blessing on one of the contestants: the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), or CPML, led by one Mike Klonsky. The CPML soon fell apart, however, as China went in the direction of state-capitalism: Klonsky entered academia and went on to become enmeshed in “progressive” politics via his links to other ex-New Leftists like Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. Ayers, you’ll recall, teamed up with Obama in Chicago on an “education reform” program sponsored by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which granted Klonsky’s “Small Schools Workshop” over a million bucks: another mil was forked over by a foundation on whose board the future President sat. Klonsky then became active in the Obama campaign, where he was deployed as a blogger on the official campaign web site, holding forth on “education politics and teaching for social justice.”

That yesterday’s Klonskyites are today’s Obamaites – and that a national icon of “progressivism” is hailing crony-capitalist China as a model to be emulated – doesn’t tell us all we need to know about the state of the American left today. But it does indeed give us a pretty damned depressing portent of what the future holds.

Under this “progressive” President, government secrecy has been raised to a sacred principle, and presidential supremacism taken to new heights undreamed of by his predecessor. The Obamaites have gone after whistleblowers, like Manning – and this poor guy – hammer and tongs, and the “progressive” community is silent – although Chris Hayes did bring up the jailing of John Kiriakou, the ex-CIA man who revealed that the US was waterboarding “enemy combatants,” (albeit without, as far as I can tell, actually denouncing it).

And while Washington’s “progressive” policy wonks might debate this amongst themselves, out in the field the troops are insensitive to such arcane subjects. To a political hack like Lisa Williams, and her crew at the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, Bradley Manning is a figure to be shunned. In the 1960s, liberals of her ilk lionized people like Daniel Ellsberg: today, they’d be denouncing him for putting “in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform” and howling for a long jail sentence.

I have to note that the various “gay veterans” organizations, which pushed so hard to reverse the ban on “open” gays in the military, are cheering Williams on. That Manning is a soldier, and a gay one, too, matters not at all to these losers. I heard one hard-bitten old Lesbian officer even accuse Manning of “treason,” echoing the worst of the warmongering neocons. It’s scary, really, to see all these leather queens rallying to Williams’s defense. Having assimilated the military culture of an imperialist power, they have become its purveyors within the gay community. With gays in the military comes the frightful phenomenon of gay militarism: I wonder how long before these people start pushing for a war against Russia because Putin won’t allow Gay Pride Day in Moscow.

Glenn Greenwald, alone among prominent lefty-liberals, has raised his voice against the de-priding of San Francisco’s iconic celebration of gay liberation, and he out-does even me in his outrage. However, Glenn left out one key fact regarding this incident: the parade committee gets $58,400 from San Francisco’s “arts” budget – and, even more important, is granted the all-important permit to put the festival on in the first place. The Democratic party politicians who control San Francisco government from the top down aren’t about to let them get away with valorizing someone who’s being mercilessly prosecuted by this administration. He who pays the piper – and you know the rest.

After a long evolution from a free-spirited and totally non-governmental phenomenon, San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade has become a veritable arm of the city’s political establishment. I marched in the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, way back in 1972, I believe, as part of the official Libertarian Party contingent. We gathered in a Pacific Heights park, and marched down Polk Street, about 5,000 people – much to the consternation of the police, who had the good sense not to try to stop us. We had no permit, no corporate sponsors, and not a single politician showed up to speak.

All of this is rather ancient history, and dates me terribly, but then again there’s no use denying I’m old enough to remember when Dianne Feinstein opposed San Francisco’s domestic partnership ordinance on the grounds it would inevitably lead to gay marriage. It was only when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon convinced her it wouldn’t that she agreed to go along with the program.

Straight politicos have “evolved” since then, or so they tell us, but the point is that the gay movement, as a political phenomenon, has “evolved,” too – and not in a good way, as the Manning de-Grand Marshaling demonstrates. These people are nothing but liberals shorn of their best impulses and mired in a soggy swamp of identity politics, political correctness-gone-bonkers, and an instinctual authortarianism. They care no more about the preservation of our constitutional rights and protections than, say, the membership of the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, they regard any talk of the Constitution – a document written by straight white men – as politically suspect. After all, isn’t it those right-wing extremists who are always going on about the Constitution?

They don’t care about civil liberties – not when they’re the cops – and they don’t even want to talk about foreign policy, except to complain about how long it’s taking us to intervene in Syria. (That’s you, Carl Levin: why don’t you hurry up and retire?) All they care about is getting more Free Stuff from the government, and pushing for “gay marriage.”

Well, then, screw them. I’m done with the “progressives,” who have sat by and watched people like Bradley Manning, John Kiriakou and Julian Assange get taken down by their politicians, and said nothing – or, worse, defended the persecution of those who dare speak truth to power. We’ll have to re-build the old civil liberties/anti-interventionist coalition on a new basis, by reaching out to a new generation, one that will regard the Lisa Williamses of this world with the contempt they deserve.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

Here is a link to my recent debate at American University with Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, on the subject of gay marriage: see also here. The event was sponsored by the Janus Forum, a project of the university’s Political Theory Institute, and my thanks go out to them for their gracious hospitality. Thanks also to Jonathan, who was not only a very worthy opponent, but also one who made me think about my own position. This is what the Janus Forum is all about: looking at both sides of a question, no matter how “settled” it may be in the minds of those who take a position one way or the other. Long may such programs prosper.

I’m having great fun on Twitter these days, and I urge you to join me on this wonderfully interactive site: you can do so by going here.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Forward by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy my biography of the great libertarian thinker, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), here.

201231254839 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fjustin%2F2013%2F04%2F28%2Fimperial-america-and-the-end-of-progressivism%2FImperial+America+and+the+End+of+Progressivism2013-04-29+02%3A00%3A45Justin+Raimondohttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012312548 to “Imperial America and the End of Progressivism”

And how could it be otherwise. Obama is giving them what they want- attention, adoration, and "gay marriage." In turn they give Obama adoration back and 100% support of everything he says and does, whether wrong, illegal, immoral or all three.

“…Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this country. We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform…"

Ah, what's the wait for the decision of the military "justice" system when this Williams hack has already pronounced him "guilty"? Aren't we supposed to be a society run by a civilian government? So who cares what a kangaroo court within the authoritarian confines of the military "justice" system has to say about Manning's whistle blowing? Well, you do care if you're a career minded opportunist whose only commitment is to yourself and not universal human rights, which includes the right of an occupied people to violently resist foreign military occupation.

The modern gay rights movement was born of rebellion against unjust government authority and demanding the state jackboot be lifted from the necks of consenting adults engaged in what used to be politically incorrect sexual behavior. Now its being used to buttress reaction via the gay marriage movement and cheering on U.S. wars of aggression. The times, they are changing. Unfortunately, not for the better.

Justin there are Progressives and then there are Israeli-centric Progressives – and to Israeli-centric Progressives, the militarism of Imperial America is essential for continuing theft of Palestinian land. I keep saying (and will until I die) that one cannot be anti-war and pro-Israel at the same time.

I have a hard time understanding the argument that doing this or that puts "the troops in harms way". By its nature, a military puts people in harms way. That is its purpose. We are also supposed to revere the troops for being in harms way, but we must never put them in that position? I am totally confused. Maybe a mental midget like Lisa L. Williams can explain this to me. Of course, this is all about using the military as a political cudgel. The reason for government secrecy is to cover up its crimes. Bradley Manning exposed some of this and, of course, must be silenced.

Mr. Raimondo's excellent article fingers the shallow authoritarian reflex by San Francisco Pride.
It's Lisa werk to keep the cash flowing……….. from the like of Bank of America and AT&T……..

"Lisa holds various leadership positions in numerous community organizations including the African American Democratic Club (Vice President), Black Women Organized for Political Action (State Board), African American Voter Awareness Project (President), and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club (Board Member, PAC Committee). Lisa is a native San Franciscan with deep ties to the community and active in the local music scene as a promoter of musicians and DJs in San Francisco and Oakland."

I'm sure the busy Lisa has no time for any malcontent' Private's problems….. But as Glen Greenwald points out:

"Also in Good Standing with the SF Pride board: Clear Channel, the media outlet owned by Bain Capital that broadcasts the radio programs of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; a pension fund is suing this SF Pride sponsor for making cheap, below-market loans to its struggling parent company. The health care giant Kaiser Permanente, another proud SF Pride sponsor, is currently under investigation by California officials for alleged massive privacy violations in the form of recklessly disclosing 300,000 patient records, and was previously targeted with criminal and civil charges, which it settled, for dumping a homeless patient, still in a hospital gown, on skid row…..'

Who cares where the money comes from when roaring around on your Harley in leather…. Just get the show go on, and let the little people sweat the details……

The nineteenth century saw improvements in standards-of-living never before seen in all of human history. The rise of the bourgeoisie correlated with spread of classical liberalism, which among other things, recognized political privilege for what it was: the means by which the rich live at the coerced expense of the poor. In this sense, liberalism (in the classical sense) was motivated by egalitarianism.

To defend their status as rulers against the growing threat of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class recruited the intellectual elite to confuse the issue. According to them, it was not the government's authority to take your property by force which left you poor. Rather, we are told the core of all of society's ills is merely the bourgeois right to own property. Thus the proletariat were unwittingly recruited into the service of the elite against the bourgeoisie.

A closely related myth is that of 'progressivism.' We are told that 'egalitarianism' is not about equal rights, but about equal outcome. Government, we are told, is the means by which we would engineer a better, more prosperous, more 'fair' society. They even hijacked the term 'liberal,' whose meaning in the United States is not the one used in the rest of the world.

This myth has had more staying power than that of communism, but it serves the same function: provide intellectual cover for the rulers. As this article documents, the status of self-imagined intellectuals as members of the ruling class has always been honorary, and always quickly revoked the moment one isn't willing to sacrifice one's moral principles in the service of the rulers.

left this right that……two turds in the same punch bowl. there's only liberty or death people.

the fact that a bunch of smug pathetic no cal's are down on manning isn't a shock. those ipad addicted prius driving morons have no clue. zero. zilch. nada. they are not liberals. tommy jefferson was a liberal. no, they are state worshipping authoritarians pure and simple.

[…] Imperial America and the End of ProgressivismAntiwar.comAs America hardens into empire, and the assumptions and conceits of imperialism become the social and political norm, the American “left” is morphing into a mutant caricature of itself: we see this in the recent decision by the San Francisco “Gay Pride …and more » […]

The US population has been trained to worship the military. The tribal instinct for predatory violence is universal and inescapable, and as with the emperor's new clothes, those willing to speak the truth to tribal exceptionalism will be branded traitors.

The truth is quite simple actually, and right out there in the open: "warriors" are killers, thieves, and rapists; and war is the pre-"civilized" norm of "might ***IS*** right", "strength ***IS*** all", and "the strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must".

As long as humanity turns a blind eye to the evolutionary legacy of instinctive violence and the societal legacy of organized warfare,…so long as these go unacknowledged as the evils they are, while warrior violence is worshipped as patriotism, all of humanity will remain in the shadow of barbarism, slave-victims of psychotic power addicts and their killer gangs.

The legitimacy of the state and its Pretorian militarism must be repudiated.

…San Francisco, in many ways, isn’t part of America: like Washington, D.C., and certain other urban blights, it is another country altogether…

Now if only we could make such unofficial status official. Anyone else out there for conducting an experiment in reversing the constitutional procedure for admitting new states into the union and try kicking one or two OUT of it? The most difficult part would be deciding whether to start with Kalifornia or Neu York.

Yes, invading armies by the nature of what they do are putting people in harms way. The suffering of the people living under the jackboot of a U.S. occupation dwarfs anything the U.S. must endure. We count our fallen soldiers in the thousands, while the invaded people count their deaths in the hundreds of thousands and millions. And countries like Afghanistan and Iraq have less than 1/10th the U.S. population. Here a leader of SF Pride is siding with the mightiest military machine ever assembled that is constantly waging wars of aggression across the globe.

The U.S. has not suffered greatly from war. The most casualties we suffered in a war was from shooting at ourselves in a civil war using 19th century military weaponry. It took until recently for the U.S. to suffer as many combat deaths as it did during the Civil War since the conclusion of that war in 1865.

just a thought on the self-caricature of the gay left (re San Ftrancisco parade) – they have fought for recognition of their rights and now that the institutions which opposed them have 'come around' so to speak, they feel more like part of the mainsteream and are willing to identify with the culture that formerly persecuted them. So now they can persecute somebody too.

hurray! Good going. Like the Israelis, first persecuted and murdered, now they are the gang that runs the camps. Hurray! What progress!

" I marched in the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, way back in 1972, I believe, as part of the official Libertarian Party contingent. We gathered in a Pacific Heights park, and marched down Polk Street, about 5,000 people – much to the consternation of the police, who had the good sense not to try to stop us. We had no permit, no corporate sponsors, and not a single politician showed up to speak."

It's moments like this when I remember the libertarian movement was the vanguard and not the "me, three" as when the mainline libertarians have finally caught on to gay marriage, about 30 years after it might have been a meaningful or powerful statement.

Regardless, The great patriot of our time is a slight unassuming self described gay atheist libertarian computer nerd. The Gary Bauers, Maggie Gallaghers and yes, the white supremacists like James Kirchick can go cry in their beers. It's over. There is some alternate currency somewhere which will bear Manning's likeness for all time.

Angela,
The old Libertarian Party was a lot of things that they aren't anymore – I remember back in the early 80s when I attended the Maryland Libertarian Party state party convention. One of the lead Libertarians was Palestinian by heritage, and then another attendee was the wildman, Karl Hess of West Virginia, who had to sell books because every dime he earned was confiscated by the IRS. Everything was considered; as well as drunk and/or smoked. Now the Party is run by wannabe Republicans, very concerned about the public perceptions and awaiting their turn to hold the reins of power.

Except for issues of gay rights, most gay organizations I am aware of are not particularly left or right on most other issues.

Although the example of Manning and the Gay Pride parade may be particularly egregious, given its apparent status as a branch of the local democratic party, not surprising at all.

Outside of the two political party organizations, I would well imagine that San Franciscans as a whole would voice more support for Bradley Manning, and more resistance to empire than most citizens of almost any other US city.

Seems a bit unfair to conflate a democratic party-infested gay organization with leftists, (it's not) and progressives (it's not), and then to conflate the whole thing with San Francisco in general.

More Austrian faux history. The 3 post WW2 decades were the most successful (in raising living standards) in human history. When Keynes ruled and the purpose of government was recognised to be the general welfare of the population. General welfare includes limiting and containing the ravages of capital.

Justin, how can you call Glen Greenwald a "lefty liberal" if he's "alone" in raising his voice? Either Glen, or the others calling themselves liberals, will have to be re-labeled. And this is just one of many, many issues Glen doesn't see eye to eye with on the other so called libersals.

I don't find language in the statement about discipline and "should have never been allowed to happen" to be unusual at all. It's corporate language (you discipline a subordinate) and it's how corporations address their mistakes: "this should never have been allowed to happen". It's the same language is used so easily by politicians of course. Anyone not trained to speak the dialogue has just been self-employed for too long or something :) Whether it's authoritarian I will leave as an exercise to the reader :)

It's only unusual if you see the Gay Pride parade as not corporate but as a free flowing ad-hoc party (do you discipline a party – haha what kind of parties are you going to?). But that it apparently has long ceased to be.

They are wrong of course. Manning is a hero which such petty sell out nothing people not only aren't, but can't even grasp.

As for this:
“Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this country. We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform – and countless others, military and civilian alike – will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It is, and would be, an insult to every one, gay and straight, who has ever served in the military of this country.”

Haha, the military is so used to be brown nosed that they forget what a real insult would sound like. Well one could just go for the "@#$@ you" but how about this: joining the military is willingly cooperating with a murderous state instrument to kill your fellow human beings, for nothing of any value. It is being paid to spill the blood of innocent men, women and children for the sake of military contractors and profiteers.

It really is amazing to see "support the troops" language used to thought-crime (yea, it's a verb now) Manning support (even "the hint of support"!), Because, because some veteran somewhere might take it the wrong way ….

Ugh, I don't "support the troops" and never have. I can be convinced they are not the root of the problem, that that's systematic. I can be convinced that many veterans have now become some of the strongest allies in the fight against the wars of empire.

Once upon a time we were taught that it was the New Deal that brought the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. History made this case inconveniently undefendable. So the story changed: It was the Keynesian 'stimulus' spending of WWII that ostensibly brought about economic recovery. This is what I was taught in high-school and college. But this too is inconveniently countered by actual historical fact. So the story has changed yet again: The economy may have recovered only after WWII (when government spending went down), but (according to the Keynesians) it was due to pent-up production capacity only developed as a result of WWII. Refutation of the claims of Keynesians is readily available to anyone with an interest. But that was not the point of my comment.

Justin offers us a specific real-world example of anti-state sympathies being co-opted by the state. This is only a specific example of a general principle, and examples are legion. My point was that anyone who posits that the supposed abandonment of 'progressive' principles by Democratic politicians is another example ignores that progressivism itself is such an example.

Regarding Keynesianism: It was embarrassingly undefendable in the face of the stagflation of the 1970s, which according to Keynes, was impossible—not, as is now claimed, merely unaccounted for, but flat-out impossible. Never mind logic, Keynesianism was discredited by actual economic reality. What displaced Keynesianism at the time was the monetarism of Milton Friedman. He made a lot of noise in defense of free markets, but his economic theories conspicuously made apologies for a central monetary authority. This allowed him room in the accepted political discourse.

The first function of a central bank is to fraudulently finance government spending—particularly for war, for which the plebeian's appetite can only be temporarily manufactured. Political and economic disagreement on the subject is only allowed to the degree that this fundamental institution isn't threatened. That's why the economic debate is supposedly between the Keynesians and the monetarists, or more recently, the supply-siders. Any argument that draws into question the benevolence of our rulers is out-of-bounds.

"There is some alternate currency somewhere which will bear Manning's likeness for all time."

This is actually a good idea: a virtual currency which, unlike Bitcoin, is generated by "mining" something of public value like government secrets. However, the sheer volume of "reserves" of government secrets is likely to undermine confidence in the currency.

"We’ll have to re-build the old civil liberties/anti-interventionist coalition on a new basis, by reaching out to a new generation, one that will regard the Lisa Williamses of this world with the contempt they deserve."

The question is, who is going to provide the leadership, now that the Old Left and the Old New Left are racing to the graveyard? You have keenly observed that what little is left of that crowd has abdicated their historical position. but who is ready to take it up? The Libertarian Party, or the Liberty Movement Paulistas? Frankly, I can't see either of them building a real political or social movement capable of fighting the two-headed War Party.

The Libertarian Party is too fractious, and a good part of it's membership won't even deal with the war question. The Paulistas abdicated by their essential non-response to the establishment's provocations during the primaries, and just prior to, the Republican Convention. The decision to be civil towards those who spat on them was disheartening. The Paul delegates, including the one's disfranchised by the leadership, should have raised hell and DEMANDED that their delegates be seated. But when have either of these groups ever shown more than verbal fighting spirit? You don't play by the rules once your opponents have thrown out the rulebook.

You can't inspire people by remaining within the confines of electoral politics. The reason the left made so many gains in the 60s, or the 30s, is because of a mobilized population, and a leadership that understood that elected leaders are worthless without that mobilized public.

Lt Callies prosecuters and whistle blowers should now be tried along with Pvt Manning . " THE TRUTH IS HARMING THE COUNTRY " or Lt Callie should be compensated and maybe given the medal of honor . Now the lies must go on for the good of the country and the saftey of the troops ..

I know. I was born 20 years too late to run with Rothbard and Hess and 15 years too early to be at Students for Liberty events without seeming like that creepy cougar. My buddies and I got Bob Barr. Goddamn the fates.

Really enjoyed this article, agree with most of it, and then you aid how much you love Twitter!!!! I felt compelled to tell you how much I hate Twitter for taking a huge tax break, then moving into my neighborhood and driving up all the rents!!!

They are people loyal to the Democratic Party and then there are actual liberals/progressives/lefties. It's the same as most Republicans not being actual conservatives in any meaningful sense of the word.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].